I ran into a very interesting and costly problem yesterday at a client who uses Macola for their accounting system. There are a number of RBase applications which read/write records to/from the Macola data files using ODBC. The Macola files are on a MS-SQL server. When attaching the tables, which is much better with 6.5++ inline patch which recognizes longer field names and allows for alias names, the data types of some fields are not properly reported.
Autonumber fields are not reported as such and EVERY SQL table includes an autonumbered field. In addition, SQL allows for SMALL INTEGER fields which are only 2 bytes in size, limited to +/- 64K in values. If you project an RBase table from the SQL Table these characteristics are not recorded. Both fields are defined as normal integers. If you then populate your projected table with data and try to insert it into the SQL table you get errors which are very difficult to trace. The first is that the insert command will report INCORRECT NUMBER OF VALUES because you can't include the autonumber field but you may not know there is one or if it exists, which field is it. The second error dealing with small integers is even harder to find. If you have a value which exceeds the limit of the small integer, the ODBC ENGINE reports an error with no clue as to what has happened. There is no reference to the field which caused the problem and you are lost unless you can get to the designer for the foreign database. This is often times impossible due to security or other issues. It would be quite helpful if RBase could show the proper definition for the attached tables. I have reported this bug to RDCC and am posting it here as a heads up for others who may be experiencing similar problems. Ron Peterson ================================================ TO SEE MESSAGE POSTING GUIDELINES: Send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message body, put just two words: INTRO rbase-l ================================================ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message body, put just two words: UNSUBSCRIBE rbase-l ================================================ TO SEARCH ARCHIVES: http://www.mail-archive.com/rbase-l%40sonetmail.com/
